D a v i d  C o r t n e r . c o m

P h o t o g r a p h y    e  t  c .

238 Rivercliff Drive
Connellys Springs, NC 28612
davidcortner@pobox.com

 

 

 

 

This page is a sort of slow-motion blog.

The big problem I have with blogs is that they drain a lot of creativity and effort that could be better invested in, oh, I don't know, photography, or writing, or web design for clients. Remember clients?

Not to say that blogs are bad -- some are a lot of fun -- I'm just saying that in the wrong hands they can easily turn into creativity sinks (think of tar pits for creative ambitions). So you've been warned: whenever I start worrying too much about just how to say or display something here, that's a sign that I'm spending too much time at this and I'm going to just get it posted and get out.

This is also a good place to stash URLs of vendors and other sites that I want to be able to find after my bookmarks get reoganized, supplanted, or grow beyond all reason. Maybe others will find them useful, too.

Something Completely Different (8/2/08) A tip for would be WebYep users; a return to websites for writers; Flash-encpsulated DVD for a client's website; and down to the sea in (very small) ships...

:: more ::

 

Color Calibration (7/25/08) In the previous note, I parenthetically carry on about this Samsung 243T monitor. It's about three years old; it originally sold for 6-8x what I paid for it. It worked very well right out of the box; I fixed the base (although it worked OK with the broken base, as my eBay seller promised it would) with just $6 worth of JB Weld epoxy; and I just now calibrated it....

:: more ::

 

Technology Tempest (7/20/08) Monitors, iPods, and car stereos... Three years ago, the Samsung 243T was a $1,600+ monitor. I just bought one on eBay for $243 including shipping (oddly enough). It has a cracked base, but so what? At worst, I'll put it on a monitor support arm, and I might try that anyway. By all accounts this is a far better monitor for Photoshop [it's fabulous! 7/25] than the one I bought a couple of weeks back for twice the money.

:: more ::

 

Lighting fried another monitor (7/14/08), so I'm now down two Viewsonic 19-inch screens in a few months. BreezeBrowser is making quicker work of the second wedding I've used it on (but I'm still learning some basic stuff about making it work well). My BVS batteries worked a treat for a studio shoot for a CD and book cover BUT something is awry with the company.

:: more ::

 

Keep up with the domain names you give a damn about! (5/31/08) I've just spent a week getting one back for my wife . . . The real lesson is that I need to triple-check the status of those I maintain for others.

:: more ::

 

BVS Pulsar battery packs (5/30/08) -- I got really tired of having to wait for my studio strobes to recycle, and I hated having to look for outlets and string long power cords all over creation at remote shoots. Killing two birds with one stone, I bought a BVS Pulsar 3.1 kit and prepared my Canon Speedlites for location duty . . .

:: more ::

 

Alert! Chipset heat sink not detected, system halted! (5/25/08) With four websites and two portfolios begging me to work on them, a major monthly update for Desert Exposure just days away . . . This. Was. Unacceptable. I rebooted my machine (a Dell 4600C) to finish an XP update cycle and that's the message it gave me. 2 seconds into its boot cycle, it just stopped. Again. Then again. So I took out my soldering iron and went to work.

:: more ::

 

Going a little retro (5/16/08) -- I took some of the take from the big wedding over to the parents of the bride. Nice Flash gallery built in Photoshop. It looked good on their computer and I do enjoy the company of happy clients. Except that the navigation was cropped out by their tiny monitor which made it a lot less elegant to view than it should have been. My first thought was to adjust the settings. But my second thought was that this is just a specific instance of a general problem . . .

:: more ::

 

Reinventing wheels (5/12/08) -- So a couple of things have come out of my being overwhelmed with wedding shots. First, it's not like this is a new field to anyone but me. There's software and there are specialized vendors out there who exist to make this profitable. I looked at a couple of software packages and went with the simpler, cheaper of the two . . .

:: more ::

 

Managing worry (4/26/08) -- I shot a big wedding last weekend. Big for me, anyway. 3000 files to sort. Had some scares. First, it was supposed to be an outdoor affair. I'd walked the grounds ahead of time with the father of the bride, so I knew just what to expect. Ha. . .

:: more ::

 

I GET QUESTIONS....
DID I SHOOT THE ECLIPSE LAST WEEK? You bet. Looky:

February 20, 2008. There were clouds moving in fast, sucker holes to the north of me, sucker holes to the south. I was going to let this show go by but thought, you wuss!, all that gear just sitting here and no more total lunar eclipses until 2010. Now get out there and see what you can get. So... this. I put the telescope on a Losmandy G11 mount, rougly polar aligned it (I couldn't see Polaris), then waited under roaring pines for a sucker hole to move over the eastern sky. Didn't take long. Didn't have long, either: I made two frames. This is the better one.

Techstuff: Astro-Physics 5-inch F6 | Canon 20D | RAW mode | 2 seconds @ iso 200
Five minutes before totality, five seconds before 90 minutes of clouds moved over.